On two of the most important issues of our time, a stifling consensus is
beginning to break up

"Enough is enough”: blazoned over the front pages of two national newspapers, that was the verdict on wind farms from energy minister John Hayes last week. But it could just have well been spoken about Britain and the EU, by any of those 53 Tory MPs who inflicted a humiliation on David Cameron over his wish to accept a limited increase in the Brussels budget.

Both episodes caused a furore, but what was significant was that each marked the cracking apart of a suffocating all-party consensus which has imprisoned our politics for far too long. Even a year ago, it would have been unthinkable that so many Tory rebels would be willing to defeat the Government over the EU – or that a minister would question the plans to cover our countryside with wind farms. For years our politics has been frozen in a claustrophobic unanimity, whereby all parties agreed that we must not question our loyalty to the EU – or the need to “fight climate change” by suicidally distorting our energy policy in favour of those absurd windmills. But on each issue, those who spoke out last week were aware that their actions were viewed with sympathy even in the highest reaches of government.

Mr Cameron may secretly be pleased that this rebellion will help him strike a Thatcher-like pose, “defending Britain’s interests” against demands for a further huge increase in the spending of the Brussels Monster – as his EU colleagues head for a new treaty which will more than ever marginalise the British as second-class “European citizens”.

Equally, he may not have been displeased by the outburst of a minister he appointed with a specific brief to curb the onward march of the ever more unpopular wind farms. Of course, Mr Hayes’s comments provoked uproar from his Lib Dem boss Ed Davey, from greenie lobby groups and, above all, from the seriously rattled wind developers who see a large question mark looming over their plans to cash in on Britain’s great subsidy bonanza. But the phrasing Mr Cameron concocted to fend off the protests of Ed Miliband was very telling. “We have got a big pipeline of onshore and offshore wind projects,” he admitted, which would have to go ahead. “But frankly all parties are going to have a debate in this House and outside this House about what happens when those targets are met.”

What “targets” was he referring to? He couldn’t possibly have meant the EU target which commits us to producing 32 per cent of our electricity from renewables within eight years. Technically, this is out of the question: it would require us to spend £100 billion on another 24,000 giant turbines, at a rate of nearly 10 a day, in addition to the 4,500 we’ve already got (which produce between them less electricity than the 2,200 megawatt gas-fired power station that opened in Wales in September, at only a fraction of the cost). We may, he implied, be unable to stop the 3,500 turbines already under construction or with planning permission, but as to what comes after that, we must have a serious national debate.

As I say, the significance of last week’s theatre was that it showed a suffocating consensus at last starting to crack, and the genies of common sense and the national interest trying to struggle out of the bottle. On both these huge issues, which are doing such damage to our country, though we are nowhere near the beginning of the end, we may have reached the end of the beginning.

After Sandy: the warmist case falls apart

A bizarre note in the otherwise inspiring response of New Yorkers to the disaster brought on them by Hurricane Sandy was the claim of Mayor Michael Bloomberg that this had won him over to support President Obama as the man to “lead the fight against climate change”.

Inevitably, as the area was hit by a 12ft storm surge, climate activists had rushed to blame global warming for this “unprecedented” event – only to be met with a wall of historical facts showing it was nothing of the kind. According to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, hurricanes were much more frequent and intense in the 1940s, and have lately been at a historic low. A storm surge flooding Manhattan in 1821 was 30ft high. The Galveston hurricane of 1900 killed 8,000 people. And so forth.

But just as odd was Mayor Bloomberg’s faith in President Obama’s record on fighting climate change, supposedly evidenced by a marked recent drop in US “carbon” emissions. When I was in the US during the last presidential race in 2008 and global warming hysteria was still at its height, this issue dominated the campaign. Both candidates vied with each other in promising every kind of drastic action, from supporting the CO2-limiting “cap ’n’ trade” bill then going through Congress, to covering the country with windmills to help create “five million green jobs”. Obama’s first major policy statement after being elected was a video sent to 10,000 delegates at a UN climate conference in Poland, promising to “lead the world on climate change” and pledging full support for the mammoth treaty planned for the UN conference in Copenhagen the following year.

From then on, however, it was downhill all the way. Cap ’n’ trade was junked by the Senate, Copenhagen was a fiasco, the global-warming scare deflated like a pricked balloon, and the only reason why the US has seen a drop in its CO2 emissions is because its power plants have switched from coal to less carbon-intensive gas, thanks to the shale gas revolution which has halved gas prices.

The winds of Hurricane Sandy may waft Obama back into the White House, because he has been seen on television looking presidential (the one thing he is good at). But his record on climate change since 2008 has been all but non-existent.

It is always amusing to see BBC journalists struggling with the metric system that their politically correct empire forces upon them. I particularly enjoyed the girlie reporter standing in two inches of water and shrieking at us that the storm was so big that it covered “thousands of square metres”.